Don’t bother with this. It’s half finished SEO fodder, and while most of it is pretty good, it’s probably never going to get done due to competing incentives (i.e. running a business) on the owners’ time.
Spend $125 on Horowitz and Hill’s The Art of Electronics, 3rd Edition. It’s the last electronics text you’ll ever need.
Art of Electronics is popular but kind of horrible.
1) At the level you can understand it, you don't need it. There are better, more in-depth, shorter books.
1) At the level you can't, it's incomprehensible. You'll run into a brick wall.
It's hard to recommend something without knowing background, but to do electronics well, you need to know basic linear algebra and differential equations, and understand (at least on a cursory level) the Laplace domain. You also need to be comfortable with poles, zeros, and rational functions.
That's a high bar. The most common mistake I see is trying to get further without being over that bar. Below that, you have popular books, many cartoonish, which explain what voltage and current are and the basic components. That's enough to do some basic Arduino projects and robotics, but not really get what's going on more deeply.
Above that bar, there are much more in-depth and theoretical approaches one is ready for the Art of Electronics.
Horowitz and Hill tries to compress that stuff down, toss in a bunch of oddball topics, and it doesn't really work.
I wouldn't call it "horrible" -- many of the explanations are good and there's a lot of practical advice. But it is worth noting that AoE is an electronics book, not a circuit analysis textbook or a signals and systems textbook. The brief review in the first chapter is just that -- a review. If you want to develop a deeper intuition about how voltages and currents behave in electrical circuits, you'll have to look elsewhere.
The problem is that learning one hinges on the other, and you can't understand the practical at the depth AoE goes into without first understanding the theory.
Someone in the thread mentioned it was designed for physicists. It might be okay there. That's a kind of unique background where someone might understand the theory without the application. However, most of the time I've seen it used, it's a recipe for frustration.
brilliant.org has decent courses on linear algebra, including nodal analysis ($100/year or so). You don't need to know a lot; you do need to know how to express a linear equation as a matrix and solve with row reduction, and eventually, how to apply that to nodal analysis.
alcumus and AoPS textbooks are pretty adequate for rational functions, complex numbers, roots-of-unity, etc. You should know everything in their intermediate algebra and precalculus textbook (and ideally, their title textbooks: AoPS Volume 1 and 2). These aren't too long, are much more advanced than normal high school curricula, and are worth doing in either case, skipping the parts you know. Next step is something like MIT 6.302 OCW, which is brilliant.
For differential equations and Laplace, any differential equations textbook will be adequate. I would not do a deep dive here. A shallow one will more than suffice. If you kind-of-get-it, that's good enough.
If you lack calculus background for this dive, OSU MOOCulus or AoPS Calculus are good places to go. OSU will be easy, step-by-step, and AoPS will be challenging, so it depends on your background.
For most people, this takes 2-4 years, and you can't really cram it (which is both good and bad news; a little time each day is almost as good as learning full-time here; you can read about the spacing effect).
With AoE, the machinists handbook, and some textbooks on medicine/chemistry/agriculture/geology you could rebuild society on a different planet. It's one of those counterpoints to the "nobody knows how a pencil is made" thing.
It's probably only good for a beginner with like 180 IQ. You can cover weeks of material in 5 pages, and it's well over 1000 pages total.
I'm an electrical engineer and I own a dozen or so textbooks for referencing. I don't even use AoE for referencing because it's so dense.
You missed the point of the "nobody knows how a pencil is made". It is not about gathering all the knowledge in one place, but how knowing just enough enables us to go much further.
I'm not really trying to make a big statement, since the general gist of 'I, Pencil'[1] is obviously indisputable. But the point is actually about self-organization rather than atomization (ie maximum specialization). It doesn't make particularly strong statements about whether breaking knowledge down into parts is intrinsically better, just that a self-organizing system (specifically a profit incentive) will cause actors to move towards whatever level of specialization is most effective.
There are known caveats to the general idea (Nash equilibrium, Hotellings's law) but I'm just trying to point out that even despite the general correctness, there are people who are very heavily vertically integrated. And you would in fact expect those people to exist, because local minima are a fact of reality and you need people to understand larger parts in order to see past local phenomena.
'Ars Longa, Vita Brevis'[2] is a well-liked post that is in line with what you're describing. It's a bit funny, because the weak form argument (specialization is generally good) is totally obvious and there's basically no way to attack it. Specialization is the thing that has made society possible, and if anything it's more effective now than it was at the invention of simple tools. But the strong form requires some pretty specific assumptions.
I have it and it's not helping me a lot as a beginner. Maybe there should be something between the "paint by the number" and "get a master in electronic" levels.
AoE, Machinery's Handbook etc are wonderful references, not for learning.
“Make: Electronics” by Charles Platt and "Practical Electronics for Inventors" are both good practical recommendations. What to prefer really depends on your background. I'd add "Electronic Devices" by Thomas L. Floyd if you prefer more academic/systematic approach.
I recommend looking at “Make: Electronics” by Charles Platt.
I read Electronics for Inventors, and have even pushed myself through respectable chunks of AoE, but Platt’s book really helped to drive home some concepts and spans a mere 350 pages.
Do you guys read the whole thing from start to finish or just look up things you want to understand more from time to time? It's like the thickness of LOTR, so that would take extraordinary patience.
I use AoE as a reference, but I’ve read full chapters from time to time when I’ve worked on relevant projects. I’ve never done an end to end read. Maybe I will when I retire lol.
I want to set aside time to read chapter 5 at some point. The precision electronics chapter is supposed to be bomb. Culminates in a design review of the autoranging circuit of one of the common handheld DMMs.
I have TAoE (but probably 2nd Ed, as I’ve had it for some years) and it is both educational and very dense.
That said, I bought “Learning the Art of Electronics: A Hands-On Lab Course” and really like it. There’s a good bit of practical, accessible knowledge there. Imho worth checking out for anyone who likes the idea of TAoE but finds it just a bit deep.
FWIW, my formal education is CS with a dose of digital electronics thrown in. For anything analog, I’ll try and find existing circuits close to what I need.
Am I so old that I'm the only one that remembers the Forrest M Mims books that you could pick up at Radio Shack? He really did a great job of making some of this understandable without getting into complex math.
There's definitely been an uptick from my experience. I'm an EE, so I generally skim read the top 50 articles to pick out the ones that are of interest to me, and skip over anything especially "WebDev" which traditionally made up most of the HN content. I've been favouriting links much more over the last 2-3 months.
Computers originated from geeks who were interested in electronics. Now days useful electronic components can be acquired easily and cheaply. Makes the hobby much more approachable.
I have no idea. I started learning electronics as a hobby last fall and now I’m seeing the posts everywhere. I dismiss it as my personal frequency illusion.
yes the trend is that some of those outsourced EE stuff is now back from overseas, we're going to make more devices here hopefully before the last generation of EE engineers die out.
Right. It stops at the point it becomes useful. They covered the basic theory of EE, and then got stuck. The project has apparently been stuck there since 2020.
"The Art of Electronics", by Horowitz and Hill, is far more useful. It's not an easy book, but it teaches you how to actually design and build stuff. The original target audience was physics grad students who need to build some piece of hardware for their research.
Their explanations of how to think about what transistors do are very useful. Horowitz and Hill get across some basic useful concepts, such as:
* Components are not ideal, but today, many of them, operated within their limits, are pretty close to ideal. So, if you're not doing something that requires very high speed or very high power or very low noise, you can often use off the shelf parts in a straightforward way, without getting too clever. Arduino is this concept taken to the max.
* Learn to read data sheets. That tells you what you can buy and what problems you can get pre-solved.
* Design and build well-behaved sub-assemblies and connect them up. Don't try to do the whole thing at once.
* Learn to design PC boards. It's not that hard, and the tools are quite good.
> Components are not ideal, but today, many of them, operated within their limits, are pretty close to ideal
Sure, but the bigger insight in the first place would be that all measurements have error tolerance. Which is a slightly different topic, so I'm not sure that it's the last book I'll ever need.
In particular reading on switch mode powersupplies it sounds like inductors, resonant circuits and electro magnetic interference are black magic. And this field developed a lot since the first book.
Maybe that's why I couldn't learn anything useful from TAoE: I wasn't a physics student. It seemed to be neither an good introductory text nor a good reference, and the choice of topics is not very practical too.
Looking at the table of contents, I think it might be exactly what I need. I have a degree in pure math (lots of cs), which puts me one degree further removed than physicists from being able to do practical things. It looks very practical.
"Ultimate Electronics" author here -- waking up and seeing this on HN this morning!
Reading the comments here, it seems like the summary of feedback is simply "please write more sections". It's true that I haven't had much time to devote to this project lately due to other work commitments, my apologies.
Adding any new section involves three major intertwined components:
1. the conceptual explanatory text,
2. the equations and algebraically-solved examples, and
3. the schematics and interactive simulations.
Right now my focus is on building out all three (probably roughly equal in time demand) and I am wondering if that is a style that is working? Any other feedback on the content or style itself? Thanks -- your feedback is encouraging :)
Nice site and explanations, I think there would be value in adding a few more analogies / examples where it gets math heavy - my brain borks at some of the equations as while I'm good with logic - I'm pretty terrible with math - but maybe it is simply required understanding.
Also - a way to download it as a epub and / or PDF would be excellent.
I do actually like that they don’t resort to water analogies like a lot of electronic instruction tends to. The hydraulic analogies I think only work to a point and then become more of a hindrance to deeper understanding, so you eventually have to un-learn it to progress.
I guess there is probably an ideal middle ground where it can be presented as a “you can think of it kind of like this analogy, but then here’s the actual concept you should learn instead of learning the analogy” kind of way.
Re: analogies, having spent years answering questions on electronics.stackexchange I think the worst one is probably the electron.
At this point you'll be halfway through typing "but electrons are real, not an analogy" - but what do you think of when you think of an "electron"? If it's a ball, or even a point, then that itself is an analogy which will break down in all sorts of annoying ways. Electrons are slippery little non-localized bastards which can tunnel through solid objects. And don't get me started on holes. People like to think of electrons as "real" and holes as "not real", simply because they're defined by their absence, but in semiconductor physics they are both equally real and important.
If you use electrons, you have to face all sorts of basic problems like "why does electricity travel much faster than electrons move?" and "Why is the sign wrong on all of my calculations?" and "Which direction is current actually flowing?" These confuse people with an intermediate understanding.
It's much better to start with the field as primary. People understand gravitational fields and magnetic fields reasonably well. From these you can build an understanding in which it's the field carrying all the energy and the electrons are just along for the ride. Each carrying its own tiny electric field.
As someone who teaches electronics my experience is that analogies (including the hydraulic one) are immensely helpful to students as long as they understand them as analogies. I always tend to say, that in reality one has to look closely at transfer curves and formulae, but this would be true for actual hydraulics as well.
My goal in the use of analogies is to give them a basic "if there is more of that, there must be less of this"-kind of intuition. This is a really, really useful skill that helps you in practise, because you will automatically do a double-check if you miscalculate or if the result doesn't fit your intuition (and thus sharpening it).
After understanding the basic systemic relationships one can go and have a more accurate look, but depending on who we are talking about and what they want to achieve that might not be needed.
Many electronic calculations could also be done on a deeper physical level, which would be more accurate, but also much more expensive to calculate. This is not practical for the typical electrical engineer, which is why they go for the simplified calculations.
Similarily there are amateur tinkerers which will be able to do most of what they want by relying mostly on analogies and that is okay as well. The math is there if you wanna go deeper as an amateur, just as physics is there if you wanna go even deeper as an electrical engineer.
That being said the analogy also serves a purpose for the electrical engineer. Everything is quicker if you intuitively know that voltage has to rise at point x and less current goes through point y etc. Sometimes you don't even need to know how much
For me it made sense when thinking about DC. It misses a couple important paradigm shifts for AC though, like resistors sometimes being used to set the ratio of voltage to current, rather than resisting anything. Gets even trickier at higher frequencies, since you have to start imagining the pipes all being made from soft material or something to model the capacitance and inductance of the wires. But how do you model the EM fields being at right angles to eachother? Also I just can't make the cross coupling of wires work in the hydraulic version. Hydraulics are contained to their pipes, their is no field surrounding them. Ditto with explaining something like a transformer. Not to mention the importance, in practice, of the right hand rule, for which I have found no good hydraulic explanation.
If you have hydraulic explanations for these, please do share.
Yeah, I work in RF and am glad I never even tried to think about any of it that way. I didn’t think about that difference - perhaps that’s why I feel so strongly about it!
I am thinking about recreating the Oberheim SEM module based on the available schematics. This resource, along with the Art of Electronics, appears very helpful.
TBH I suspect the most useful resource for that would be a semiconductor cross-reference, because the SEM-1A schematic on the Internet Archive has a lot of obsolete parts:
* the "standard NPN" (2N5172) is mostly discontinued; a few places have them for ~$1 apiece
* the "standard FET" (2N4302) is very discontinued; SynthCube has a few NOS parts for $5(!) apiece
* the CA3080 OTA is so discontinued that the first reissue by Rochester has also been discontinued; Alfa has cloned it as the AS3030E but compatibility is not 100% guaranteed.
Some of these are overlapping - for instance, many of the FETs are used as buffers because the CA3080 has a weak output - but resolving them will practically be redesigning the circuit from scratch...
Spend $125 on Horowitz and Hill’s The Art of Electronics, 3rd Edition. It’s the last electronics text you’ll ever need.